The notion of desiring, for the most part, only that which is in your complete control seems to me to be useful in many aspects of life. One way that I'm not sure that it is useful is in relationships where the object of desire is another person. The way this fails seems to me to be multifaceted. A relationship, at least a meaningful romantic relationship, is necessarily bidirectional. Desiring only to uphold one part of a relationship makes the relationship false. I do not see any meaningful distinction between an unrequired crush and a deep marriage spanning decades if what is desired is to make oneself the best possible partner rather than the relationship itself.

Moreover, I don't see a way to fit in the way that the Christian scriptures hold marriage as an icon of the relationship between Christ and the Church into that mental schema. Christ's life was the mechanism by which he brought love to the Church rather than the goal itself. I fear that this cuts into my lagest issue with Stoic ethics. They seem to presuppose a philosophical anthropology in which only the individual has real beaing. Gestalt wholes like the married couple, the nuclear family, the Church, the city, or the nation don't seem to have reality. Or at least these other things do not have the same reality as the individual.

(On this latter point I've been meaning to read Malcolm Schofield's The Stoic Idea of the City which may very well offer reasoning opposite to what I take the Stoic view to b. But I've not gotten around to it yet.)

And even if one is not a Christian, the question of the beloved as a genuine object of desire by the lover arises. The Stoic system seems grossly reductionist.

But these shortcomings should not dissuade us from using the Stoic method in a contextualized fashion. Making oneself into the best possible lover for the beloved should be a goal of a genuine romantic relationship even if it is not the only goal.

In the case of my former marriage these issues were certainly intertwined. For the better part of two decades I did spend most of my time and energy trying to make myself the best possible lover of those I loved. I didn't only do this romantically with my wife. I also did it paternally with my children. I cannot say that I did a very good job of it with either. Partly because of ignorance, partly because of arrogance, partly because of being misguided on key issues, and partly because I have a great deal of selfishness in my soul, I would never claim to have been a very good father or husband.

And yet by the middle of my second decade of marriage, I found myself increasingly dissatisfied. It wasn't a question of not loving my now deceased wife. Nor was it a question of not making being a good lover for her one of my goals - if not my chief goal. Rather it was that between the person she was, the person I was, and the way that we both lacked different kind of interpersonal and relationship skills. At the end of the day I felt very much like she did not want my love and that she did not care how I needed to be loved.

In hindsight I can see how the Stoic methodology may very well have helped me bring clarity to my thinking at the time. And elements of that clarity may very well have helped me cope with what was a very toxic relationship in some ways. But i don't see how it would have made me better as an individual. And in some ways it may have hastened a premature end to the marriage by means of divorce rather than me sticking things out until its natural end. Until death do us part.